


Somewhere Safe To Sea

by whiskey_johnny



Category: Seaward - Susan Cooper
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 19:02:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/601079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whiskey_johnny/pseuds/whiskey_johnny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.  -- Khalil Gibran</p>
            </blockquote>





	Somewhere Safe To Sea

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pikkugen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pikkugen/gifts).



"Is there something wrong?" she asked, a cold fear growing in her stomach.

The nurse hesitated. "Well, not so much wrong as... Look for yourself."

She unfurled the baby's chubby fist, and showed the thick rough skin across the palm.

"Oh," Cally said in relief, "it's only - " She caught herself. "I had that, as a child. And my mother, all her life. It's alright, it really is. It's - hereditary. And totally harmless."

"But that wasn't true, was it," she told West later. "It was a lie. It's not harmless, not at all. I mean, it's not *bad*, but..." Her fingers knotted together. She remembered her mother doing that, when she was anxious. "I gave it up, West. All of that. Why should she have to choose as well?" There was an aching feeling in her own palms, a cold sort of absence. This was better, it was.

She looked down into the scrunched sleeping face. _Your life's your own. Follow your own way, and enjoy it._ I was so young, part of her said angrily. And I didn't even know I was giving it up. And I wouldn't change it now, but. But.

She still dreamed, sometimes, about the sea. Did I give up my skin for you, West? At least it was a choice, for me.

"You couldn't choose for her," Westerly said sombrely. "You can't. She has to face that herself, the way she'll have to face other things." She understood from his voice what he meant, and she tightened her arms a little around the sleeping child. I won't leave you, she promised. Not yet. There's time, there'll be enough time. There has to be. We'll plant an apple tree, and it won't be big enough for you to climb for years and years.

"She won't be on her own, though," West said, as if reading her mind, and held out his hands. She put the baby into them carefully. He holds her so easily, she thought, looking at them together, the fierce glow in his solemn face. Not like he's afraid he'll drop her, or break her - not like me. How can he not be scared?

_We are Lugan's folk, we are a chain stretching through time. Each link must complete its circle, or there could be no chain. Do not mourn._

No, Peth, she thought fiercely. I will mourn, I do. That's part of the choice I made too.

The light came in the hospital window low and clear: a winter light. She moved to stand by it, looking out at a cage of dark branched limned in ice, a distant, pale blue sky. Nothing moved, but far away a bird cried plaintively: once, again, and then silence.

She hurt all through, a low and cramping pain. Life, she thought, was much harder work than death. It seemed unfair. But oh, the rewards!

"I should go back to bed," she said, reluctant. "I'm so very tired. Aren't I supposed to be glowing now, or whatever new mothers do? I only want to sleep for a week."

Westerly smiled and, when he had laid the sleeping baby in the hospital crib, came across to pull up the covers and stroke her hair. "You've been working hard," he said, echoing her thoughts again. "The hardest."

"Oh," she said, though she smiled, "there's much harder work to come, West." 

*

In sleep she found herself walking again on the shores of that sea between the land of the dead and the isles of the everliving, the dark heartbeat-pounding sea that she had turned away from long ago. 

In the twilight she thought at first that the low dark shape on the sand was a rock, and then a seal (her heart thumped once, hard, at the thought) - and then she realised it was a woman, fat and sleek as a seal, lifting her smooth dark head to look at Cally.

"Grandchild," she said. "Many-times grandchild."

Cally sat on the sand before her. The woman was wrapped in a blanket, but her shoulders rose smooth and bare out of it. She had a plump pretty face, but it was her eyes, their huge dark sadness, that caught at Cally.

"I'm not really here, am I?" Cally said. "I'm dreaming."

"Yes," the woman said, "and no, and yes again. It doesn't matter. I felt you calling to me, in your heart. With the yearning of your thoughts. And so I came to talk with you, out of the long past." She smiled a little. "Or the long Present, if you prefer."

"If I'd really preferred that," Cally said, thinking of how Snake had described himself long ago, "I wouldn't have - given up my skin. That's what I did, isn't it?"

"No, and yes, and no again. I gave mine up. I chose too, all that time ago." She smiled at Cally's expression, a sweet and secret smile. "You didn't expect that, did you, grandchild? But I did. I saw him when he was fishing, and wanted him more than I've ever wanted anything, and came up on shore on two legs to find him."

"I heard a story like that, as a child," Cally said. It hadn't ended well, of course.

"There are a lot of stories like it. I thought he was everything I would ever want. But the stones hurt my feet, and my skin became dry and cracked, and I could always hear the sea and my sisters crying, crying for me." The smile was gone now, the round face a mystery. "He loved me - oh, he did! - and cherished me, and our children. But it was a clutching love, not a love that lets go. I knew it, but I stayed, and dried out more and more, and lost my own voice of waves and wind."

"What did you do?" Cally was sitting very still, holding her breath like a child. It wasn't the same, it wasn't.

"I stayed seven years. And then I could bear it no longer. I rose in the night, and took the skin I gave him from the bottom of my dower chest, and let the sea swallow me."

The sky was growing dark, and the sea. The selkie's black eyes, wet and deep as a seal, glittered back stars in their depths.

"It's not the same, for me." Cally sounded as certain as she could.

The seal-woman smiled, and took her hand. "Perhaps not," she said, and turned Cally'så hand over to run her finger over the place where the thickened skin had once been. "Perhaps the choices you were offered were better. But, Calliope - " Cally, who had been lost in those eyes, started at the sound of her name, " - teach your daughter."

The seal-woman spread out her own hand, palm to palm against Cally's. Cally felt the brush of the horny skin against the softness of her own, and it was like her mother's hands so long ago. Grief grows dim, she thought, but it never really leaves, does it? But there are bright things, too.

"I will," she promised, and linked her fingers through the other woman's: an echo of her finger-twisting gesture, but not anxious now. "I promise."

"Teach her to hold fast, you and your Westerly, and teach her to let go. The lessons of this land, and that other one, and the sea." The woman's fingers gripped hers tightly, and she leaned in and kissed Cally, a cool press of lips on her forehead, and Cally opened her eyes.

It was night outside the hospital window now: she could see it through the crack in the curtains, a thin sliver of black. Beside the bed in the cot her daughter made a fitful noise in her sleep, like the distant cry of a gull.

I promise, Cally told her silently. I promise.


End file.
